John Carmack tweets more about the upcoming release of the DOOM 3 source code, indicating he is rewriting some code for legal reasons: "Lawyers are still skittish about the patent issue around "Carmack's reverse", so I am going to write some new code for the doom3 release."

Tom wrote on Nov 16, 2011, 20:17:Huh? EAX has been useless since the audio stack got rewritten in Vista. All modern game audio is done completely in software, and AFAIK you have to do special tricks (Alchemy?) to use EAX in the older games that used it if you run them on Vista or later.

Some people still use XP like me. I bought an Audigy 2 ZS sound card to have hardware EAX support for games. Now, I just use onboard audio.

@SirKnight You are absolutely correct.That's why.. Let me see if I understand this:Carmack is going to write new code that effectively does what his old code does, just not in the way it did it when he originally shipped D3.So in effect, he's writing new code for the masses so the company doesn't lose money on OOOOOLLLDD software that nobody would use to make a game today.

Okay, I can see how that makes sense coming from a company that released Rage and then instead of releasing a patch they released this statement: 'Wellp... Worked on our machines..'

[VG]Reagle wrote on Nov 16, 2011, 21:48:God Carmack is cranking it to our buttholes daily. The day he quits yapping his trap is the day gaming gets better.

Oh yeah. Well... at least he's not Molyneaux Seriously. He could be Molyneaux.

Tom wrote on Nov 16, 2011, 20:17:Huh? EAX has been useless since the audio stack got rewritten in Vista. All modern game audio is done completely in software, and AFAIK you have to do special tricks (Alchemy?) to use EAX in the older games that used it if you run them on Vista or later.

Huh? EAX has been useless since the audio stack got rewritten in Vista. All modern game audio is done completely in software, and AFAIK you have to do special tricks (Alchemy?) to use EAX in the older games that used it if you run them on Vista or later.

Yeah patenting algorithms is fucking stupid. Any programmer could've come up with this method independently. When I was doing stencil shadows I got sick of nearclipping and capping shadow volumes and one day thought "heeeey.... wait a sec. why can't I precompute volume for decayed light source anyway?"Which led me to google search and discover that carmack (and creative) had elegant working solution of the same idea.

To be honost I dislike Creative Labs as a company. They have a griphold on the soundcard market with EAX (though some companies have reverse engineered it with limited success)-- and yet continue to release overpriced mediocre sound cards. They update their drivers maybe once every 2 years (if at all). I recently bought an ASUS XONAR DX soundcard and I love it for sound editing, though it only supports up to EAX 2.0.After the aggressive affair with cock-blocking id with Doom 3's shadow technique (on a patent Creative made a decade before hardware was even capable of running said method), I find their reputation to be a crappy taste in my mouth.

I implemented this algorithm years ago. It's a really nice way of solving the usual problems with shadow volumes efficiently. It's a shame this has to be patented. Just goes to show patents, especially software, do more harm to the field of computer science than it helps.